What We Fix in Your First 48 Hours

Founders ask us this all the time: "What can you actually do in 48 hours?"

Short answer? A lot. We've run this playbook across dozens of startups now. The pattern is almost always the same. Messy infrastructure, money leaking everywhere, security holes you could drive a truck through. And most of it is fixable fast.

Here's our exact playbook, hour by hour.

Day 1 Morning: The Audit

We don't touch anything until we understand what we're working with. No changes until we see the full picture.

CI/CD Pipeline Audit (2 hours)

We pull up your GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or whatever you're running. Here's what we're looking for:

Build times. If your pipeline takes more than 10 minutes, there's waste. We regularly find builds that should take 3 minutes running for 20. That's developer time you're burning.
Failure rates. We look at the last 30 days of builds. More than 5% failing? Something is structurally wrong, not just flaky tests.
Security gaps. Hardcoded secrets in config files. Docker images running as root. Missing vulnerability scanning. We find these in 80% of audits. Coming from a defence and government security background (our team holds NSV clearance and includes an ISO 27001 Lead Implementer), these gaps jump out immediately.
Deployment process. How many steps? How many manual clicks? Can a new developer deploy on day one? If the answer is no, your bus factor is dangerously low.

AWS Bill Review (1 hour)

We connect to your AWS Cost Explorer and pull the last 90 days. We're hunting for:

Cost spikes that don't correlate with anything useful
Idle resources burning money (EC2, RDS, EBS, NAT Gateways)
Missing Reserved Instances or Savings Plans
Data transfer costs that point to architectural problems

Average finding: 30-40% waste. For a startup paying $5,000/month on AWS, that's $1,500-$2,000/month we can save you. Every month. Permanently.

Infrastructure Mapping (1 hour)

We document what you actually have. Every service, every database, every queue. How they connect. Where the single points of failure are. What happens if any one component goes down.

Most startups have never done this. There's a rough mental model spread across 3-4 people's heads, and half of it is out of date. We turn it into a real diagram that anyone on your team can read.

IAM Security Check (1 hour)

This is where things usually get uncomfortable. We check:

Who has admin access? Too many people. Always too many people.
Are there old access keys? Almost always yes.
Is MFA enabled? Often not for service accounts.
Are IAM policies following least privilege? Rarely.

We find exploitable security issues in 9 out of 10 audits. Not theoretical risks. Real gaps that a motivated attacker could use today. We apply the same security standards we used for government work, and the gap between that bar and what we typically see in startup environments is wide.

Day 1 Afternoon: Quick Fixes

Now we fix the urgent stuff. Things costing you money or putting you at risk right now.

Fix Broken Pipelines (2 hours)

The most common fixes:

Caching dependencies. Your pipeline downloads the same npm/pip packages on every single run. Adding proper caching cuts build time by 40-60%.
Parallelizing test suites. Running tests sequentially when they could run in parallel. We've turned 15-minute test runs into 4-minute runs doing this alone.
Removing unnecessary steps. That lint check running twice. That Docker build happening even when nothing changed. Gone.

Result: Build times drop from 15-20 minutes to 3-5 minutes. Your developers stop context-switching while they wait for builds. That productivity gain compounds every single day.

Remove Unused Infrastructure (1 hour)

We terminate idle EC2 instances. Delete unattached EBS volumes. Remove old snapshots. Clean up unused security groups and load balancers.

Pure, immediate cost savings. No trade-offs. No risk. Just money back in your account starting now.

Reduce the AWS Bill (1 hour)

Beyond removing unused resources, we:

Right-size oversized instances
Set up CloudWatch Log retention (most accounts store logs forever by default, and you're paying for it)
Enable S3 lifecycle policies
Recommend Savings Plans for stable workloads

Average immediate savings: 20-30% of the monthly bill. You'll see it on the next invoice.

Patch Security Gaps (1 hour)

The dangerous stuff gets fixed immediately:

Rotate compromised or old access keys
Enable MFA on root and admin accounts
Remove hardcoded secrets from code (move them to Secrets Manager or Parameter Store)
Lock down overly permissive security groups

These fixes take an hour but prevent breaches that could sink your company. We've seen what happens when startups skip this. It's not pretty, and investors don't like surprise breach disclosures during due diligence.

Want this done for your startup? Book a free audit →

Day 2 Morning: Build the Foundation

Day 2 is about making sure these problems don't come back. Fixing things once is easy. Keeping them fixed is the real job.

Infrastructure-as-Code Modules (2 hours)

We write Terraform modules for your core infrastructure. Not the whole estate. Just the pieces that matter most:

Networking (VPC, subnets, security groups)
Compute (ECS services or EC2 autoscaling groups)
Database (RDS with proper backup configuration)

Why does this matter? Because right now, if your infrastructure breaks, it's a scramble to rebuild. Somebody has to remember how it was set up, and that person might be on holiday. With IaC, you can rebuild everything in 15 minutes. Reproducibly. Every time.

Autoscaling Configuration (1 hour)

We set up autoscaling rules based on your actual traffic patterns. Not guesses. We look at your CloudWatch metrics and configure:

Scale-out triggers for CPU, memory, or request count
Scale-in rules so you're not paying for idle capacity at 3 AM
Minimum and maximum bounds to prevent runaway costs

Most startups either don't autoscale (wasting money) or autoscale incorrectly (causing outages). Both are fixable in an hour.

Monitoring and Alerting (1 hour)

We set up monitoring that actually tells you something useful:

Application health checks — not just "is the server up?" but "is it serving requests correctly?"
Error rate alerts — you'll know when your error rate spikes before your users start tweeting about it
Cost alerts — get notified when your daily AWS spend crosses your threshold
Deployment alerts — Slack notifications when deploys succeed or fail

No alert fatigue. We've been on too many teams drowning in noise from 200 alerts nobody reads. You get the signals that matter and nothing else.

Secrets Management (1 hour)

We move every secret out of your code and into AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store:

Database passwords
API keys
Third-party service credentials
Environment-specific configuration

Your code never touches a real secret again. Deployments pull secrets at runtime. Rotating credentials becomes a one-click operation instead of a code change and redeploy. This is baseline security hygiene, and it surprises us how many well-funded startups haven't done it yet.

Day 2 Afternoon: Report and Roadmap

Full Infrastructure Report

We deliver a complete document covering:

What we found — every issue, ranked by severity and cost impact
What we fixed — every change made, with before/after metrics
What remains — issues that need more time or your team's input
Architecture diagram — your infrastructure, documented properly, probably for the first time

90-Day Roadmap

This is the plan for the next 3 months. Prioritized by impact. Realistic timelines. No padding.

A typical 90-day roadmap looks like this:

Month 1: Complete IaC migration, implement proper staging environment, set up disaster recovery
Month 2: Optimize database performance, implement blue-green deployments, strengthen monitoring
Month 3: Security hardening, compliance preparation (we lead ISO 27001 implementations, so this is our wheelhouse), cost optimization review

Each item has a clear effort estimate and expected outcome. No vague deliverables.

What the Numbers Look Like

After 48 hours, here's what you walk away with:

AWS bill reduction: 20-30% (visible on the next invoice)
Build times: Cut by 50-70%
Security issues fixed: 5-15 critical and high-severity items
Infrastructure documented: From "it's in my head" to a real architecture diagram
Clear plan: A 90-day roadmap your team can actually execute

That's two days of work. No hiring process. No onboarding. No six-figure salary commitment. Just results.

We've done this for startups from seed stage to Series C. The problems are surprisingly consistent, and so are the fixes. The difference is whether you deal with them now or after they cause an outage during your biggest sales quarter.

Ready to see what's broken in your infrastructure? Book your free audit here — we'll review your setup and show you exactly what we'd fix first.